


Ash Like Snow

by deervelvet



Category: Gundam 00
Genre: Gen, Psychological Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-19
Updated: 2018-07-19
Packaged: 2019-06-12 23:05:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15350718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deervelvet/pseuds/deervelvet
Summary: Day 2 of Gundam 00 Week 2018Prompt: “Ash Like Snow” - First Line VS Last LineLouise had always liked her hair. [Timeskip-era character study.]





	Ash Like Snow

_//the sky is dyed red in ebony darkness, and the distant stars are swallowed up//_

 

* * *

 

Louise had always liked her hair. It was naturally a shade of blonde that many women spent good money attempting to achieve at the salon, which meant it was desirable, even enviable, and as a young impressionable girl to whom looks had meant a great deal, that fact was a great source of pride and a wellspring of grade school boasts. She was proud of the length of it; it hadn’t been the quickest process to grow it out so long. She could remember how excited she’d felt when it had first reached past the tops of her shoulders, then her shoulder blades, then her waist. It had always been healthy without much effort, glossy and sleek, and strong as a horse’s mane. She had never been plagued by tangles nor split ends nor rainy-day-frizz. Genetically, as far as her hair went, she’d hit the jackpot.

 

During her year abroad in Japan, she’d stuck out like a bright yellow beacon in a sea of dark chestnut browns and cool raven blacks. Even in her native Spain, such a fair shade of blonde was something most children grew out of as they aged, and the occasional blonde of adulthood was more a muddied bronze than Louise’s canary tones, but the dichotomy was so much more pronounced when in a place where lighter hair tones were something that could almost exclusively be achieved through peroxide treatments. Her female classmates there had oohed and ahhed over it for the first few weeks of classes starting, and it had been the physical feature Saji had complimented her on first.

 

When she’d been very young, she’d been cursed with the requisite gender-neutral bowl cut that all toddlers must suffer at some point. At that point, being undamaged by heat tools and styling products and the natural aging process, it was fluffier, not unlike the soft yellow down of a new duckling, and it tended to curl outward in all directions. Mamá had tried to tame it with bows and bands and mousse, but in the end, it proved indomitable. It was such a prominent feature that she’d spent her first several years of life being affectionately called pollita - little chick - for the uncanny resemblance. As she aged, though, and as her hair grew in length, it came to resemble her Mamá’s very much.

 

Most of all the things she liked about her hair, Louise had always liked how her hair looked like Mamá’s hair. Nearly without exception, every time young Louise and her mother would go out and about town, a stranger would spot the two of them walking hand-in-hand and exclaim, “Oh, que linda, she’s like a miniature version of you!” Young Louise with her head like a bouquet of dandelions would puff up her chest proudly and beam. It was a proud thing for little Louise in her some four or five years to be compared to her mother; it meant she was a big girl, which was very important, but even more critically, it meant that people could see in her traces of the one person she idolized more than any other. Even in her preteen years when being compared to one’s own mother was lame and gross and worthy of ughs eye-rolls, Louise never minded when the occasional visiting distant relative or coworker of her father’s would spot her and her mother together and remark how it was like someone had cloned her mother. She would simply straighten her back, produce a coy smirk, and brush her hair over her shoulder looking like a pampered poodle.

 

Looking at her hair lying in the sink now like the leftover rejects of a wheat harvest, Louise thought she would have felt more. More upset, more nostalgic, just more. She’d cut it nearly to the very roots, shearing off the source of her pride and her vanity until traces of her scalp were visible when she turned the right way under the bathroom light. She’d spent several minutes doing just that already, cocking her head to the left, then slowly swiveling it to the right, trying to see her handiwork from all angles in the mirror. Short splinters of hair stuck to her neck and shoulders like golden needles, and longer pieces had draped themselves down her chest and sleeves. With only a single mirror, the back was harder to see, and so she reached up with a hand to feel it. The finely engineered pseudo-nerves in the synthetic fingers and palm sent messages to the synapses in her brain telling her that it felt like the back of a head with a close haircut.

 

Louise frowned and jerked the hand away. It worked perfectly, essentially feeling with no difference from the way her real hand felt things, but it hadn’t been the sensation she’d wanted. She hadn’t wanted a simple one-to-one literal relaying of what the back of her head felt like to the touch. She’d wanted to feel a pang of guilt for destroying the thing that had taken her longer to achieve than any other thing she’d worked towards up until this point in her life. She wanted to feel sick over the way she’d mutilated it, distraught over the sight of the strands lying coiled around the drain or limply dangling from the edge of the porcelain.

 

Louise wanted her mother to chide her for her rash decision.

 

“Oh, pollita,” her mother would have - should have said, “what have you done to all your pretty hair?” She could hear her if she really listened. Like Mamá was right there in the room.

 

Louise wanted her mother.

 

“I’m sorry, Mamá,” she murmured aloud to the sink full of her hair. “It’s so much easier to put a flight suit on without my hair in the way. Please don’t be mad.”

 

Something tickled her nose. She reached up with her hand - her hand - and brushed at the offending spot with the back of it, the hair-covered scissors still clutched in her trembling fingers on the other side. Her hand came away dry. She’d expected tears, not just a bit of hair tickling her nose.

 

Maybe she couldn’t cry over the loss of her hair. In Biology class in secondary school, Louise had learned that hair was mostly just keratin, the same stuff fingernails were made of. Most of it wasn’t even alive. The part she’d cut off had always been dead, and the living parts in her scalp were still alive, and so crying over it wouldn’t have made much sense.

 

Maybe she couldn’t cry over the loss of her hair because it was such a trivial thing to cry over when she’d lost so much more. What was hair compared to her family? What really did it hurt to cut it off? How much did vanity really matter?

 

Maybe she couldn’t cry over her own hair now that she knew how other peoples’ hair had tasted as soot mixed with the sugary wedding cake and sangría punch still on her tongue.

 

“I’m doing this for you and Papá, so please don’t be mad. It’s just hair. I can grow it back out when I’ve gotten you back to me.”

 

* * *

  

_//I chose to grow stronger, and I’ve come this far//_

**Author's Note:**

> Again, my infatuation with the s1-s2 timeskip makes an appearance. 
> 
> On my second and third full rewatches of the series, I really realized just how tragic Louise’s story is. But I think she’s also an incredibly strong character; she was on course for university and a professional career and was surrounded by people who loved her, and in an instant, all that was destroyed. To take all that pain and be as productive as possible about it (if misguided) was something really courageous considering how young she was. But then again, that’s a lot of characters in this series!
> 
> Anyway, I hope Louise gets all the good things she deserves in the new G00 content!


End file.
